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Restricted Area. I was convinced that it would be a Diablo-like of sufficient quality, with a good graphics engine, deep skilltrees, and a fascinating future setting. What I got was one of the most awful and unbalanced messes of all time.

I'm pretty anal about researching a game before I buy it so the most recent one I can remember is Deus Ex GOTY. I know it's supposed to be this masterpiece but I'm two missions in and it's not that fun. The supposed "decisions" you make don't alter my gameplay experience in any way. Like when you are clearing out Clinton castle I found the alternate entrance but it still ended in killing everyone, no alternate way to accomplish the mission or anything. If I'm being premature in my evaluation please berate me because I really do want to like this game. In the words of the wifey "it's just so dated!"

I'm pretty anal about researching a game before I buy it so the most recent one I can remember is Deus Ex GOTY. I know it's supposed to be this masterpiece but I'm two missions in and it's not that fun. The supposed "decisions" you make don't alter my gameplay experience in any way. Like when you are clearing out Clinton castle I found the alternate entrance but it still ended in killing everyone, no alternate way to accomplish the mission or anything. If I'm being premature in my evaluation please berate me because I really do want to like this game. In the words of the wifey "it's just so dated!"

The clinton castle part is easily done by sneaking around and not firing a single shot. Maybe you just got need to get used to the mechanics of the game.
In that part for exaple you don't need to go outside in the castle, just locate the container and come out by the alternate entrance.
The game provides you with enough paths to approach thing differently. There aren't earth shattering decisions that will change your game completely, but it truly lets you play as you see fit.

I don't know what my first bad game was, as there's just been far too many over lots of different formats through the years.

But I can tell you what my most recent one is. Two Worlds 2. I spent hours plodding through this most dull mediocre RPG building up my character, only to find that regardless of how you built your character up the final boss requires a cheap shooting gallery game to destroy it. The fact that it can easily kill you with its powerfull attacks is made all the worse by the fact that they've disabled the save feature during this lengthy final battle. Why? What mean sadistic streak made them do that? Meaning that if you die you have to start it all over again right from the start. To call it a slap in the face would be an understatement, more like a kick in the teeth. Most underwhelming dissapointing game I've played for ages. And no I didn't bother trying to kill the boss. After 5 or more attempts I said good riddance to the game and uninstalled it.

Pool of Radiance 2 was my life lesson in not buying things based on name recognition. I ran out and grabbed the very first box I could find despite being an unemployed recent graduate. Then I install it to find a stripped down engine, crazy pre-alpha 3rd ed rules, dialogue that made no sense, quests that couldn't be finished and the list goes on...

I really, really wanted to like that game as much as I loved the original but I just couldn't.

Myth III is a pretty close runner up for worst game IMO.

As for Deus Ex: I'd acknowledge that the engine hasn't aged well, but it's still one of the most open-ended RPG/FPS hybrids I've ever seen. However, it doesn't hold your hand through making choices like talking rather than fighting, hacking into a terminal because you guessed the password or deciding to be a pacifist no matter what. The alternate routes are more akin to Nethack voluntary challenges are conducts, and some are quite difficult to pull off.

I had more fun beating the first level of Deus Ex as a pacifist than I did completing entire lesser games. Then there was the level (Hong Kong?) where I snuck in, accomplished the mission, put laser trip mines in every doorway only nearly kill myself jumping out the window because the CAT triggered the mines! Good times.

I'm pretty anal about researching a game before I buy it so the most recent one I can remember is Deus Ex GOTY. I know it's supposed to be this masterpiece but I'm two missions in and it's not that fun. The supposed "decisions" you make don't alter my gameplay experience in any way. Like when you are clearing out Clinton castle I found the alternate entrance but it still ended in killing everyone, no alternate way to accomplish the mission or anything. If I'm being premature in my evaluation please berate me because I really do want to like this game. In the words of the wifey "it's just so dated!"

When people talk about 'decisions' in Deus Ex, it's not like Mass Effect, where selecting dialogue choices leads to starkly different outcomes.

Bar the ending (where one choice, 30 minutes before the end decides which one you get) and a tiny handful of sidequests there are only two or three moments of 'decisions' in that Mass Effect / contemporary game narratifve style.

What we mean about decisions are:
Am I going to run straight in blazing.
Am I going to climb to that roof top, hop over to that roof, slide in on the top floor, grab what I need and leave through a window.
Am I going to take out everyone from sniper vantage points aorund the complex, or come in form the sewers and take people down with the prod.
Am I going to use ducts, lift shafts and other means to move around without ever once being spotted.
Am I going for a drink...

The thing is, most of the game -does- play like that. It's just NOT very obvious. There's not "here is the alternative vent shaft to the objective" popping up on your HUD after your handler tells you over the comm.
And the maps are nigh useless. It's -very- easy to get lost in many levels, meaning you end up confronting enemies when you may be trying to avoid them.

Have you ever played any of the hitman games? If you do, you may well remember how you may have spent a good portion of your time just deciding what to do, before you do it. Deus Ex plays a lot like that.

The most important suggestion is; be careful, and take your time. If you can't see a way around without killing someone, you're not looking hard enough.

two games come to mind when i think about bad games. Reason is simple: I wanted to like them, I played them longer than I would play some random game.

First one is Final Fantasy 7 on PC. I got to play it just year after almost beating grandia 2. What I got was absolute crap. The worst thing was random encounters. Whole game was like grass in Pokemon. After n-th battle with some crab dragons I decided to just f--- it. Classic of gaming it might be but to me it is piece of shit.

Another one was FEAR. Reason is simple. It is a dull dull game. Fight, scary stuff, walk few meters, fight, scary stuff, walk few meters.
Everything was dull about this game. Enemies: i tried to remove the game from memory so i barely remember anything right now but doesn't fear have only three kinds of enemies. identical soldiers, soldiers in mech armour and spiderman invisible enemies.
Weapons: one cool gun which was useless because it had limited ammo. everything else felt the same. there is this penetrator gun. sounds cool in manual. i didn't realize it was different gun than my main machine gun because it sounded and acted so similar. and it looked the same.
Scenery: office, office, roof, maintenance shaft, roof, office, office. For god's sake. they should get people to design this game who actually have life.

those problems would not be that big of a deal if most important thing in FPS was not incredibly boring:

shooting. It was incredibly boring even if we don't take boring weapons into the account. I spent most of the time hidding behind the corner, then activating bullet time so i could shoot few guys. then I would hide again. I would do that over and over again. Against same enemies, with same weapons, in same environment.
Mech enemies were the worst. Had to hide like a mouse, finding few seconds to shoot the guy then hide again.

there was no thrill there. I either shoot them in boring way or i tried to make it more exciting which would always result in my death.

They are not probably my first bad games I had played. They certainly the worst games I had played and I won't forget them for a long time even tough I would love to.

Afterburner on the C64 - the first game where I completely fell for the hype. I hardly ever got the chance to buy a 9.99 computer game, and boy was I completely gutted at this purchase when I finally got the chance to ride high in the skies. I think it was an Activision game, too.

Pool of Radiance 2 was my life lesson in not buying things based on name recognition. I ran out and grabbed the very first box I could find despite being an unemployed recent graduate. Then I install it to find a stripped down engine, crazy pre-alpha 3rd ed rules, dialogue that made no sense, quests that couldn't be finished and the list goes on...

I really, really wanted to like that game as much as I loved the original but I just couldn't.

Yes. That game is absolute junk. Especially when it wipes your hard drive due to a bug. What a let down.

Worst game I've ever played? The Simpsons Wrestling. My God, that game was awful.

My mother bought me that for either Christmas or a birthday....she looked so pleased with herself I couldn't bring myself to ask her to exchange it and in fact still can't convince myself to get rid of it a decade later.

I've probably played a lot of stinkers but the worst game I've bought in recent memory was Breach, a game so bad it appears to have been removed from Steam. Sluggish controls, mediocre visuals and shoddy weapon handling. Also, no bugger plays it.

Alex Kidd in Miracle World.
For those that dont know, Alex Kidd was Segas pre sonic posterboy. The game is pretty damn horrible.
However, since it was also the first game I ever played, my memories of it are fantastic. But that doesnt change the fact that its aweful gameplay. Its also painful looking. The sky hurts my eyes when you look at it for a small while.

Oh I don't know, Janken was a pretty cool way to fight people. Oh, and... umm, that's all I got. I had a Master System II so the game was actually on the BIOS chip so I couldn't get rid of it if I wanted to.

I'm usually pretty good at filtering out the crap, but I've been caught out a few times.

I bought Republic: The Revolution. I tried for a long time to like it, I would play it for several hours a time thinking I was missing something important. Turns out it was the dev who had forgotten to include an actual game. I paid less than £5 and still felt like I'd been ripped off.

More recently, I bought Hacker Evolution:Duality. It looked and sounded pretty cool. A cyberpunkish hacker sim with an open world filled with AI hackers to hack into. What the game actually is, is a basic puzzle game with a strict time limit and shitty mini games for each of the actions. It has practically nothing to do with hacking at all.

The clinton castle part is easily done by sneaking around and not firing a single shot. Maybe you just got need to get used to the mechanics of the game.
In that part for exaple you don't need to go outside in the castle, just locate the container and come out by the alternate entrance.
The game provides you with enough paths to approach thing differently. There aren't earth shattering decisions that will change your game completely, but it truly lets you play as you see fit.

The thing with that part is it's poorly scripted: unlike the first mission, it only checks how many terrorists are still alive, not who killed them. So if you get close enough to the trigger point for Anna to go in shooting, it still counts as a violent approach regardless of how you played it.

I bought Republic: The Revolution. I tried for a long time to like it, I would play it for several hours a time thinking I was missing something important. Turns out it was the dev who had forgotten to include an actual game. I paid less than £5 and still felt like I'd been ripped off.

Elixir was founded by a former Lionhead employee, and it seems like they learned (or rather, didn't learn) something from Lionhead. What was a massive, ambitious and amazing idea had to be scaled back and back and back due to practical and publisher demands, so it ended up being a bit disappointing.

Edit: Bah, I need to learn how to use multiquoting. Or at least editing.